Blackfriars mosaic at Leicester Central

L3117. Dubbed the world's 'finest mosaic tessellation' in the nineteenth century, this is the Roman pavement which lay beneath the Great Central Station at Leicester. Part of the Act passed in 1893 which granted the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway permission to build the London Extension also legally bound the company to preserve the mosaic and to provide public access to it. To meet this obligation, the company built this tiled chamber beneath the station. Interested observers could also view the mosaic from above through a prismatic glass floor set into the platform itself. The pavement was moved in the 1970s to Leicester's Jewry Wall Museum.